Chapter One
First thing you do is, you sit there.You sit there.
You don't move. You let it wash over you for two, or three, orfour, or five minutes. You've come through it again. You've got atleast one more night of poker ahead of you. One more morningwhen you won't wake up dead. Maybe one more red-hot date inLondon.
It doesn't matter if it's the first time or the twenty-fourth, whichthis one was. What matters is that you're down out of the sky. Yourwheels are on the tarmac. You've brought your crew back safe.
You take a big deep breath. You feel the sweat that has soakedthrough your long underwear and your tunic and lubricated thefleece lining of your leather jacket, plastering it to your shouldersand back and chest. Maybe you clench and unclench your hands afew times. Man, it feels good to have turned loose of that yoke.You've held on to it for maybe six, eight hours, knuckles white,keeping thirty-two tons of bomber steady at 25,000 feet, yourhands wrapped around that shuddering yoke, your feet tensingagainst the rudder pedals. Your margin of error is down to feet,from the wingtips of the bomber on your left and the bomber onyour right. All this with deadly antiaircraft fire and cannon andmachinegun rounds from hostile fighter planes and the smoke anddebris from your comrades' planes around you cracking your universeapart just as the trip started to get dull.
Now maybe you start to slide your feet off those pedals, let yourlegs go limp a little, and here comes the pain from those relaxingmuscles, shooting all the way up your calves and thighs clear to yourhips. Feels good, that pain. It means you're still alive.
You sit there for your two or three or four or five minutes. Theysay DiMaggio liked to do that in the Yankee clubhouse before agame, just sit there by himself with his cup of coffee. But this is afterthe game, if "game" is the word for what went on up there over Germanyand was going to keep going on for God knew how long.
You let the rest of the crew get out ahead of you. Luxury. You'veheard about "luxury" all your life. Thought you'd seen it firsthand,even. How come nobody ever told you what real luxury is? It's sittingin your cockpit for a little while after the big Wright Cyclone engineshave shut down and the propellers have stopped turning. Justsitting there looking out through your scarred and milky Plexiglaswindshield at the airfield and the English countryside beyond it, atthe fine rain that always seems to be falling, at the wind sock on thecontrol tower, at those black English bicycles strewn everywhere.Now the other planes come droning in, some of them shot up andwobbling over on one wing, their pilots fighting for control withtheir yokes and rudders. Seems like always a few less coming in thanwent out that morning.
Yes, you're just sitting there with nothing more on your mindthan, Oh boy, I'm lucky again.
Finally you unstrap yourself and swing down through the hatch,and you feel the built-up tension shooting through your joints againas you amble over to where the boys are standing huddled aroundthe fuselage: Quinlan the tailgunner and Harold Loch the serious-mindedflight engineer and the rest. It's always kind of an awkwardmoment. You're all standing there in a little knot, feeling as thoughthere ought to be something to say, but at the same time knowingthat to say anything would be to ruin it. Hard to describe those emotions,exhilarated and sad at the same time, and sometimes a littleangry too, although it's tough to know at what, exactly. Maybe atanybody who's not a part of your little circle just then, maybe at thepeople who decided there had to be a war.
Here comes the ground crew already, on the run, primed to jumpin and start caulking up the bullet holes in the wings and tailfin andthe body of the Belle. They all want to know what it was like, whathappened up there today. The crew chief is up on a stepladder withhis paintbrush, slapping the next cartoon bomb at the end of the rowwith all the others. Number 24.
There's nothing left to do out there, so you turn and start the longambling walk across the shiny tarmac toward the Interrogation Room.The boys fall into stride around you—Robert Hanson the radio man,and waistgunner Tony Nastal and the rest of that great crew. They'rethe best in the business, individually and as a team, but they look upto you. Hell, you're the pilot, the one that has to do his job before anyof them can do theirs. They've come to believe in you absolutely. Theybelieve that you will get them to the target and then get them back heresafely every time. That's something to live up to. You've done ittwenty-four times and there's one more mission left to go, one moreround-trip in the Belle, and if you make it, you can all go home.
No pilot and full crew have done that yet—survived twenty-fivemissions and been sent home with their bomber—in the eightmonths that the hundreds of American B-17 bombers of the EighthBomber Command, taking off without fighter-plane escorts frombases carved out of the English countryside, have been rumbling anddroning across the Channel and over the fortified fields of occupiedFrance, and Belgium, and later on over the Fatherland itself—AdolfHitler's Germany. The first Allied force of any kind to carry the hellfireof World War II into the Führer's own territory.
In the first three months of that great offensive, beginning in November1942, you've seen a loss rate of more than 80 percent fromyour Bomb Group, the 91st. You know that other groups are catchingthe same kind of hell from those slashing Messerschmitts andFocke-Wulfs and the endless square miles of bursting flak. You knowyou and your crew could catch it at any instant of any day you're upthere. You know you haven't flown one mission yet without takingsome kind of hit. A few weeks back they damn near took your wholetail-section off, and Quinlan with it.
Hell, look at today, as far as that went. You'd hit a heavily fortifiedtarget, so you came back a little beat up. A few holes in the rightwing, some damage to the underpart of the bomb bay over the target—luckily,Vince Evans, your ice-cool bombardier, had got thebombs away before the flak hit. Your group as a whole had lost threeplanes. Three crews, thirty-odd boys you'd had breakfast with andwouldn't see for dinner.
You know all this. And still you go up there every day they tell youto.
The attrition rate got so high so fast, and the horror of it grew sohaunting for each crew that survived a run, that before long the generalsdecided to build in a little incentive, sort of like the Fuller BrushCompany did for its salesmen. Twenty-five missions, and your waris over.
And now, on this day, this fifteenth of May 1943—this time ofyear when the dogwood and the redbud would be out in full forcethrough the Blue Ridge Mountains above Asheville, North Carolina—youand your boys are one workday shy of that goal: the onlybomber crew in the Mighty Eighth within reach of finishing theirtwenty-five and being sent home with their airplane.
What does a fellow think about at a moment like that, amblingacross the tarmac toward Interrogation?
I was that fellow. I was thinking a lot of things, and I'd continue tothink about them that afternoon when I took a pass on having thecustomary few beers with some of my crew members in the lounge atBassingbourn air base, and I'd think about them on into that night,and the next day, and right up to the moment when I swung back upthrough that hatch to rev up the engines on the Memphis Belle andpoint her toward the continent and our twenty-fifth mission.
I thought about a lot of things. But here is one damn thing I knewfor sure. I knew I was a long way from Beaucatcher Mountain.
I go by a lot of names. I was "Morgan!" to various redfacedcolonels and majors who wanted to chew me out about not botheringto wear my uniform cap, or about my incurable taste for buzzingairstrips and swanky beaches where the top brass were having theircocktail parties. Some of my fellow pilots knew me as FloorboardFreddie, which I guess must have had something to do with my styleof landing a Flying Fortress. I was Dennis in a 1990 movie madeabout me and the crew. My family and closest pals back in NorthCarolina used to call me Bobby, at least until I told them to stop.Sounded a little sissy to me. My official designation in the U.S. AirForce Reserve lists is Col. Robert K. Morgan, USAFR/Ret.
To the crew of the Memphis Belle I was The Chief, and that handlehas meant more to me than any other. And to a certain otherbelle, one Margaret Polk of Memphis, Tennessee, I was "Jug Head."That meant quite a bit as well.
But in May of 1943, to tell the truth, I was essentially a serialnumber, and proud of it. The same was true of all the nearly two andone-half million men and women who wore the uniform of theUnited States Army Air Corps—as combatants, but also as groundcrew and mechanics, clerk-typists, bookkeepers, instructors. Wewere serial numbers, but we were special serial numbers.
The world war that had swept us all out of our ordinary lives, themost terrible ever fought in human history, was far from being decided.In the spring of that year, near the war's midpoint as far asAmerica was concerned, the Axis Powers dominated Europe, NaziU-boats terrorized shipping convoys in the North Atlantic, and Germanindustrial cities poured out an unending supply of tanks, planes,weaponry and ammunition. On the other side of the world most ofthe southwestern Pacific islands still lay heavily fortified in the handsof their Japanese conquerors, defiantly awaiting the massive Allied—andmostly American—counteroffensive just then gaining momentumunder Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. William F. Halsey.
The huge tide of Axis aggression had begun to buckle against itsouter limits by that year. Allied air power had played its part in theturning. The battle of Midway in May 1942 was decided at the lastmoment when a gallant squadron of Dauntless dive-bombers closedin on three Japanese carriers and incinerated them, finally turningback the slashing advance of the Rising Sun through the Pacific. Justa little more than a year before that, the outnumbered Royal AirForce had destroyed Hitler's plans for invading England in the historicBattle of Britain, shooting down nearly 1,400 Luftwaffe fightersand bombers in four hellish months of dogfighting, while takingmore than 800 fighter-losses itself.
In February 1943 Hitler's reckless invasion of the Soviet Union collapsedat Stalingrad with the surrender of the German Sixth Armyand what was left of its 1.5 million troops. Just two days before theMemphis Belle touched down from its twenty-fourth mission, the Allieswon a great victory in North Africa, accepting the surrender of275,000 German and Italian troops and paving the way for an Alliedinvasion of Sicily. Heavy bomber groups, two of them diverted toAfrica from the Eighth, played a prominent role in that breakthrough.
Yet it was far from over. The great Channel-based invasion of theEuropean continent, just now beginning to form its mass in England,was more than a year in the future. The final subjugation of ImperialJapan by nuclear explosion was two years away. Even the missionswe crewmen of the Eighth Air Force had been flying overEurope these past six months were but a prelude, an opening phase.The first of the Eighth's B-17s had touched down on British soil lessthan a year earlier, in July 1942. Only eighteen Fortresses participatedin the first raid, some railroad marshaling yards near Rouenon August 17. Through that fall and winter—the bulk of the Belle'scareer—a mission at peak force might amount to some 90 planes.
The size and strength of the Eighth were still increasing in thosemonths, and the great massed missions were still to come—the famous"Little Blitz Week" of July 1943, when it struck at sixteen industrialtargets; the buildup to twenty-two bombardment groups inthe British Isles by the end of that year; the 600-bomber run of January1944; the formations of 1,000 and then 2,000 planes shortly afterward.
What a stupendous thing it was to have been a part of all that.
Those of us who were there lived through our share of pain andloss and sacrifice. But we had this knowledge to help us through—werepresented a kind of fighting force that the great armies of thepast could never have comprehended. Those warriors who foughtunder the banners of Hannibal, and Genghis Khan, and Napoleon,and Robert E. Lee, and even General Pershing—how could they havepredicted a time when thousands of men would launch massive offensivesands fight titanic battles in machines soaring five miles abovethe surface of the earth?
We were participants in a style of warfare that had been madetechnically feasible less than half a century before it took form in theskies over Europe and the Pacific Ocean. We, and our enemies, werestill improvising rules and tactics every time we left the ground for anew day of confrontation above the clouds. The air war demandedskills that even its best surviving practitioners found hard to communicateto their families, friends, and historians—levels of competence,concentration, physical endurance, discipline, and teamworkbordering on brotherhood. Over it all was the constant grimprospect of a sudden helpless spiraling descent to violent death thatwas simply beyond the range of experience available to most peoplewho had ever lived.
Ironically—given how futuristic this style of warfare seemed in itstime—it is a mode that today seems as enshrouded in the mists of thepast as the jousting of knights in the courtyard of some medieval castle.Propellers! Leather helmets!
The breakthroughs in science and engineering that created themeans for long-range strategic bombing and fighter-plane combat inWorld War II didn't stop with our Allied victories in 1945. ChuckYeager test-flew his Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound just twoyears after that, and my era was ready for the museum crowds.Within another four years, American F-86 Sabrejets were battling itout against Russian-made MiG-15s over Korea. The Vietnam War,the "Living-Room War," brought high-tech Delta Daggers and SuperSabres and Stratojet bombers.
I heard once that some Hollywood producer had compressed theentire Vietnam War into a music video. Well, by 1991, it was allstarting to look like a video game. We were punching up smartbombs against Iraqi forces in the Persian Gulf and reducing thefourth-largest army in the world to the second-largest army in Iraqwithin forty-eight hours. How could we old-time warriors have predicteda computerized mode of combat that could inflict 100,000 casualtieswhile losing just 148 of our own, and only 458 wounded?Hell, some of our pilots of the '40s honed their skills by sitting onback porches swiveling broomsticks around between their knees!
Still and all, the surviving airmen of my generation are proud ofwhat we accomplished. Our technology was the very best that Americacould produce at the time, and besides, nobody has invented apiece of technology yet that's any more advanced than the humanheart. I flew with men whose hearts were the finest kind. We musthave done something right, in the end. We won.
So who were we, this motley, exhausted little knot of serial numbersambling across the wet tarmac on this day in mid-May 1943, atime when the whole world seemed to be engulfed in orange flamesand billowing black smoke? That was the question that had startedto play at the corners of my mind.
Individually we were about as unlikely a gaggle of warriors as youwere liable to come across in a week's time—a business-administrationstudent at the University of Connecticut, a chemistrystudent at Ohio Wesleyan, a stevedore from Wisconsin, a kid whoran a fleet of trucks in Texas, a North Carolina good-time Charlie(me), a Spokane construction worker, an employee in a Yonkers carpetcompany, a washing-machine repairman from Detroit, a pressmanat a rubber company in New Jersey, a chemist for a paintcompany in Chicago. Not the sort of crowd you might think wouldcause Herr Hitler to lose any sleep.
As a unit, though—well, that was something different. As a unit Ihave to confess that we raised a little hell.
As a unit, in the space of ten months from November 7, 1942 untilMay 15, 1943, the crew of the Memphis Belle flew about 20,000miles and dropped some sixty tons of bombs on military and industrialtargets in France, Belgium, and Germany. Flying in tight formationwith clusters of our sister Fortresses, we droned heavily abovethe clouds to pulverize airplane-assembly installations, railway centers,docks and shipbuilding plants, submarine pens, naval shipyardsand power-generating factories. To reach these targets we had to surviveskyfulls of lethal bursting metal flung at us from above, below,and to either side. Vast carpets of exploding flak were calibratedwith demonic precision by the Germans four and five miles below us,to burst within yards of our exposed fuselages. If we survived theflak—no small feat, as thousands of American widows and fatherlesschildren could attest—we still had to contend with the furiousswarms of attacking fighter planes, which could swell from tiny dotsin the distance to giant hulks of bullet-spraying intruders in the spaceof two or three seconds, then vanish just as suddenly. Our gunnersmanaged to shoot down at least eight of these banshees and probablyfive others, and damage about a dozen. It was harder than I'vejust made it sound.
For our trouble we received sixty-one decorations. Every man inthat crew took home a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal andfour Oak Leaf Clusters. However, I don't think you can measure ouraccomplishment in decorations, or even in the total miles we flew orthe tonnage of bombs we dropped. What made the Belle crew special—I'msure this could apply to the many hundreds of bombercrews who made it through that war, as well as the many hundredsof crews that didn't make it—was a quality of brotherhood.
Or something that went even beyond brotherhood. I don't knowthat anybody has ever invented a word that fits what I'm trying tosay. Our crew sure as hell never tried to describe it. It was too sacredto have a name, so we played poker and drank whiskey instead. Imean it was something that took us over when we first came togetheras a bunch of young strangers and began our training, andthat had us firmly in its spell by the time we took off on our first missionto Brest, France, on November 7, 1942, and that continued togrow in us on every new sortie afterward, something that melteddown our individual personalities and differences of upbringing andeducation and temperament, something that flowed through us assurely as our voices flowed through our headphones, something thatblended all our different skills and duties. Whatever it was turned usinto a single functioning organism of war up there in those clouds.
It was intelligence, and it was instinct, and it was alertness, and itwas technical prowess, and it was superhuman concentration, and itwas a way of setting fear aside, and it was interdependence—a wayof knowing at every instant under extreme duress what the other fellow'sfunction was, and how he was handling it—and it was faith, ifyou will pardon that particular expression. It was all those things,and yet all those things don't begin to describe it.
I'm not much of a mystic, but maybe it was history itself that hadcalled us beyond ourselves. They say that most great works of scienceand music and literature get produced at the beginning of anepoch, before the rules have been set in stone and all the tricks andsecrets of the process have been studied and analyzed and made apparentfor any fool to see. Maybe war works that way too. Here wewere, ten boys from an America that still relied on horse-drawnploughs and buttermilk churns, thrust into a kind of warfare that ranon tachometers and super-turbochargers and Norden bombsightsand ball-turrets and VHF transmissions. It was a war that left nodoubt as to which side was fighting for the good of mankind andwhich side was fighting for evil.
There was one more element—one more personality—in this mysticalmix that melded all of us into one seamless entity. That was thebomber itself, the Memphis Belle. That magnificent specimen of aB-17, the F model, the Flying Fortress, was perhaps pound for poundand bolt for bolt the most elegant war machine ever designed.
You couldn't walk past a B-17F on the ground, if you were like Iwas, and not want to get in her and fly her right on the spot. She wasa Stradivarius of an airplane, a masterpiece of balance and range andresponse and survivability in combat. She was pure geometry in motionwith her great wide slices of wing and tailfin, her four thousand-horsepowerengines capable of keeping her aloft for four thousandfour hundred miles at a maximum ceiling of thirty-seven thousandfeet—more than seven miles above the ground—at a maximumspeed of 325 miles an hour. Here was a big plane built so well thatshe was almost a liability to herself. Early in the war she could out-distanceher fighter escorts, and so she had to approach enemy territorynaked, utterly exposed to fire.
Plenty of B-17s went down. Too many times my crew and I had tolook on while flak or cannon rounds took one of these beautifulplanes in our vicinity, riddled a wing or pierced the fuel line, andturned her fuselage into an incinerator for our buddies. How awfulit was to see one of them begin that dreaded downward spiral, hearone of my crewmen urging helplessly over the phones, "Get out! Getout!" and then—if they were able—to watch those parachutes blossomthrough the smoke.
Many more of these aircraft, including the Belle, took heavydamage and survived, getting back to base riddled with holes orwith so many missing parts that she seemed outside the laws ofgravity. Although she was mostly unescorted by fighters until laterin 1943, the B-17 was not exactly easy prey. She bristled with guns.Half my crew were gunners; top turret, ball-turret, tailgunner, twoat the waist, back to back. They fired 50-caliber machineguns, oneor two muzzles apiece, in every direction, and that close formationwe pilots had to maintain, flying in clusters of four planes nearlywingtip to wingtip, created a concentrated source of fire that mademany hundreds of enemy fighter pilots pay with their lives for homingin.
No wonder those bombers became like living extensions of theircrews. No wonder we gave them sweetheart names and had beautiful,leggy women painted on their noses. They were everything to theyoung airmen inside them. They were hope, they were victory, theywere nothing less than life and death.
Just nine years before this day—at a time when I was toolingaround the Great Smokies in my father's Buick, dreaming aboutnothing more warlike than how fast I could get to my girlfriend'shouse—the B-17 had not even existed. Nothing like it had. In militaryterms, America then was in the final stages of its ancient history.
Strategists had started speculating about the combat uses of flyingmachines almost before Wilbur and Orville Wright had stripped offtheir goggles at Kitty Hawk in my home state in 1903. Sure enough,by the advent of World War I a decade later, both sides had managedto throw several thousand machinegun-armed monoplanes, biplanesand triplanes, even some multi-engine bombers, into the Europeanskies—German and British planes mostly with some French and Italianplanes mixed in, Fokkers going up against Sopwith Camels. Afew folk-heroes emerged—Manfred von Richthofen, the legendaryRed Baron from the German side and stylish Eddie Rickenbackeramong the Americans—but personal glamour aside, air combat hadalmost no effect on the outcome of the Great War.
Nor would it ever, if some of the greatest military minds of the erahad their way. The preeminent American General John J. "BlackJack" Pershing stoutly declared that the battleship, not the airplane,would remain the great bulwark of national defense. Second to theArmy, of course.
Luckily, a few stubborn rebel visionaries thought otherwise. Themost influential was Billy Mitchell. This outspoken aviator, who'dwon a Distinguished Service Cross for his own exploits over Franceand later commanded all U.S. air units under Pershing, was the firstto comprehend that air power could be a decisive offensive force infuture wars. This was shocking heresy to the Army and Navy establishments.Mitchell shocked their sensibilities a little further by daringto sink a couple of former German battleships with a squad ofeight biplanes, just to prove it could be done. When that failed tobudge the tight-lipped Pershing and the others—after all, the damnships weren't moving!—Mitchell turned himself into a one-mantruth squad, railing to anybody who would listen that the U.S. wasfailing to exploit the most potent new weapon in all of warfare. Hereceived a court-martial for his troubles and resigned the service in1925, but his ideas echoed, and steadily gained credibility.
Charles Lindbergh didn't harm the cause any when he flew the Atlanticin 1927. The country was all agog about pushing the limits ofaviation. That pitch of excitement prompted a couple of air transportpioneers to tinker with a bigger, stronger, smoother model thanLindy's rig, one that might carry mail and passengers across theocean routinely. Their names were Clair Egtvedt and Edward Hubbard,and you probably never heard of them. You've heard of theirSeattle-based company—Boeing. Within a few short years they perfecteda prototype design that would soon help save Western civilizationfrom Fascist tyranny.
That design took shape under peaceful intentions at first—Boeingtest-flew a "Monomail" air transport in 1931—but its military contourswere always just below the surface, waiting to be recognized.By 1934, when the Army was finally waking up to the need to repelan enemy invasion from overseas—maybe the reports of Germanthrongs parading to the popular Nazi song, "When Blood FlowsFrom Our Knives," had something to do with that—Boeing's fast-maturingprototype earned it a contract. Its product, labeled Model299, would be the largest landplane yet built in America, all-metal,with a wingspan of over 100 feet, an unprecedented four engines anda 2,000-mile range. A Seattle newspaperman, beholding her sleeklength for the first time, gave her the nickname that would quicklyenter American folklore: "Why," he exclaimed, "it's a flyingfortress!"
Before the war was over, almost thirteen thousand Fortresseswould be built, under steadily improving specifications. About athird of them—some 4,750—would be lost in action. But to say theymade a difference would be an understatement. Billy Mitchell neverlived to see his prophecy come true; he died in 1936. He would haverelished the words of Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the U.S.Army Air Forces in the British Isles, when the greatest conflagrationin history was finally over. "Without the B-17," the General said,"we might have lost the war."
No such grandiose thoughts were on my mind as I left Interrogationafter an hour or so of debriefing and headed thankfully to myquarters at Bassingbourn, the 91st Bomber Group's base fifty milesnorth of London. The fate of the world wasn't uppermost in my concernsjust then. My thoughts were personal, and they clusteredaround a simple, yet gigantic fact: twenty-four missions down, onemore mission to go. Then home. If we survived.
Uncharacteristically, I wanted to be alone. I had a lot of thinkingto do—about places like Beaucatcher Mountain and the other landmarksof the life I'd left behind.
Bassingbourn was a long way from Beaucatcher, but it servedpretty well as a home away from home. It was probably the creamof all the American bases in England, to tell the truth about it. To tellthe honest and complete truth, the 91st didn't exactly belong at Bassingbourn,but as long as nobody was going to run us out—and itdidn't seem like anybody was going to—we were staying put.
A far cry from the usual dreary assemblage of Quonset huts andbare ground, Bassingbourn was a cluster of elegant, landscapedcountry manors. It had belonged to some members of the Britisharistocracy, but when the American Eighth Bomber Command beganto spread itself across the English countryside in early 1942, the linesbetween British aristocracy and Allied military began to blur prettyquickly. Actually the British had thrown together a base for the 91st,but its runways proved inadequate, and we had to find a suitable replacement.
Our commander, Col. Stanley Wray, took on the task of scoutingout that replacement site, and when he beheld the baronial splendorsof Bassingbourn he acted with dazzling dispatch. He hurried us ontothe premises without even checking in with his superior, Gen. IraEaker, commanding general of the Eighth Bomber Command. Whenthe General finally did learn of Colonel Wray's lightning strike, hesputtered, "You can't move into that base! That's a British base!That's not one that we can use without their permission."
The Colonel proved cool under fire.
"General, I'm sorry," he replied, "but we've already moved in."
"Well, you may get moved out again, too," fumed the General,who then bowed to the realities. "Until you hear from the British,you can go ahead and stay there." The 91st stayed there for the restof the war. Bassingbourn became known as a showcase for VIP visitors.Well it should have, with its fine mess halls, its comfortablerooms, its workout facilities and ballfields and its comfortable barsfor officers and enlisted men. Reporters, visiting politicians, visitinggenerals—everyone, it seemed, wanted to come to Bassingbourn.
Normally after a mission, I looked forward to savoring Bassingbourn'sdelights to the maximum, especially the delights associatedwith good whiskey and good comrades, but not on this day. On thisafternoon of May 15, 1943, I closed the door to my quarters andstretched out on my bed and began to daydream.
How did I get here? How did my life ever take me from a carefree,even fabulous Southern boyhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a lifewith servants and fast touring cars and beautiful girls and adventuresinside what was perhaps the most sumptuous mansion in the UnitedStates, to this reckoning, this point in which one upcoming airplaneride could change my whole life, or end my life?
Bob Morgan? I kept asking myself, all that long afternoon andevening and into the night—Bob Morgan, who are you anyhow?And just what do you think you're doing flying a B-17 bomber in themiddle of World War II?
Continues...
Excerpted from The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belleby Robert Morgan Copyright © 2001 by Robert Morgan. Excerpted by permission.
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